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Most-Watched Software Engineering Talks of 2024
- oars 2y agoGood OP but even better posts in thread.
- the_arun 2y agoDoes this cover only GOTO conferences? If so we need to update the title to avoid being clickbait.
- rgreasons 2y agoIt appears to contain a bunch of other conferences. NDC, ElixirConf, etc.
- martypitt 2y agoNo, there's content from lots of different conferences (though, GOTO is there a lot -- maybe a good indicator of quality?)
- culi 2y agopopularity ≠ quality
- dowager_dan99 2y agofor a Mr. Beast video, maybe that's true, but for a specific audience like "Developer Conference Talk" probably a decent proxy
- belter 2y agorust vs javascript ?
- datadrivenangel 2y agoHaving watched a lot of the goto talks, I'd say that they're like a good tech conference: ~5-10% of the talks could have a major impact on your work/career, 20-30% of the talks are interesting and slightly useful, and the remaining talks are basically product pitches / sponsor slots, which can be useful but are often biased.
- culi 2y agoIf I'm not asking for too much, I'd love to see an example of a talk you consider a member of the "could have a major impact on your work" bucket
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- infecto 2y agohttps://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/tech-conferences https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/tech-conferences List of conferences the author covers
- rgreasons 2y agoReally surprised at the lack of “big” names on the list. My gut reaction was “really, no PyCon?” But when I went to the PyCon channel, even the keynotes from last year barely cracked a thousand views.
- ai-christianson 2y ago> Really surprised at the lack of “big” names on the list. I think it's pretty cool we're hearing from more voices though.
- whalesalad 2y agoThere is nothing interesting going on at pycon, usually. Most language-specific conferences tend to be pretty boring imho.
- culi 2y agoDepends on the language. Julia has a lot of cool stuff going on. And really small languages like Elm (when it was still being used) would probably involve a lot of discussion about programming language history and future considerations
- simonw 2y agoI just checked and my PyCon keynote got 6,200 - pretty happy with that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1-KQZZarpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1-KQZZarpc
- rgreasons 2y agoI consider you a pretty big name in our little corner of the world, so that number seemed pretty low to me! Expected 5 figures at least!!
- chickenzzzzu 2y ago[flagged]
- woodruffw 2y agoSeems like this over-indexes on a small handful of conferences (I had never heard of GOTO before this). It would be interesting to better understand the methodology here, particularly around discovering talks on YouTube.
- Graziano_M 2y agoLinus's talk is on there twice. If you add up the view counts, it should be much higher.
- whalesalad 2y agoRIP strangeloop </3
- spitfire 2y agoSo what (if anything) is taking strangeloops’ place?
- code_biologist 2y ago"have you tried rubbing a database on it" feels like a spiritual sibling.
- abletonlive 2y agoHopefully nothing. I’ve been to three and it’s a huge self congratulatory waste of time for everybody. Like most software conferences
- sitkack 2y agoSturgeon's Law is fractal, I have also been to three and don't regret it. Your frame of mind shapes an experience as much as the actual experience.
- Grosvenor 2y agoI mean, I expect as time goes on the number of people who get the reference goes down. Things get diluted. It slowly goes from a "Here's some very cool esoteric thing, that you can use" for people that write business systems in prolog, to "here's how to connect workaday language with workaday db in a slightly unique configuration". edit: I looked at the videos. 10 years ago the talks were Rich Hickey and "Production prolog". Did Douglas Hofstader ever speak at strangeloop? I know he doesn't actually like computers.
- sitkack 2y ago718 videos https://www.youtube.com/@StrangeLoopConf https://www.youtube.com/@StrangeLoopConf
- EncomLab 2y agoWish Jon Blow would get back out there! He was asked on a recent stream and said he has turned down invites while trying to get Jai pushed out the door.
- RohMin 2y agoI really want to learn his methodology to writing software
- podobo 2y ago[dead]
- chickenzzzzu 2y agoHis methodology is to put his hands on the keyboard, write a function, a struct, make it compile, make it produce the correct output, make it faster, make it use less memory...
- Almondsetat 2y agoConsidering how much software he has actually put out... do you?
- hiccuphippo 2y agoCheck the Data Oriented Design talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
- paxcoder 2y agoJai has been in development for a decade. I would appreciate if it were finally open-sourced.
- EncomLab 2y agoConsidering the fact that Jon despises open-source you might be waiting a long time.
- gamedever 2y agothis is a list from their videos, not all videos. There's plenty of software engineering videos with 5x or 10x more views Here's 850k views https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SO83KQuuZvg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SO83KQuuZvg look up "how to build and LLM" and your find plenty of videos with more than a million views from 2024
- ge96 2y agoSebastian Lague is amazing I liked his 3D world package drop game video
- PaulRobinson 2y agoAs others have noted, there are some problems with the methodology of how this list has been created. First, the list of "almost every" Software Engineering conference around the World[1] used, is just 72 items long. This feels light, and some conferences I would expect to see are missing: Brighton Ruby is very popular in the UK, but possibly a bit niche, so fine; but, FOSDEM however, seems more of a glaring oversight, perhaps explained by the fact that most of those talks are published not through a single channel. The author has a mechanism to add confs to this. We could try and help them with that. Then, the list seems to have ordered talks published by each conference's YouTube channel, by total views. When one of those channels posts a talk twice (for example, the Linux Foundation's keynote of Linus talking to Dirk Hohndel), you end up with split user counts which means its lower down the list than you might expect. I also think this means we're now measuring "most watched" in a slightly weird way: is this now just a reflection of marketing and subscriber reach? GOTO has 1.04M subscribers, ReactConf just 28.5K - is it any surprise that the list has more talks with more views from one of those over the other? Who is to say which conf had the better or more interesting talks? Other engagement metrics (thumbs up, percentage of subs, number of comments, how many inbound links, and so on), might provide a better number to proxy for "quality" or "best" than just views, although the author isn't making a claim for quality, just views, so perhaps I'm asking for something beyond what is reasonable or what was promised. This is a good start of an idea though, it wouldn't take much to make it better, so best of luck to the author or those who want to steal the idea: I'd love to see a better list in the future, and perhaps over a longer period of time than one year, too. [1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/tech-conferences https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/tech-conferences
- guipsp 2y agoIt's also missing most (all?) of the more academic conferences.
- neves 2y agoYou are nitpicking. They just did an algorithm to list a bunch of popular/nice talks for software engineers. I'll watch a bunch of them. I'd like to see my fellow hacker news members to point to good talks that aren't present in the list.
- elric 2y agoI got to see some of these in person, though at different conferences. If you're at all interested in Java, the talks by Venkat Subramaniam and Nicolai Parlog are worth a watch.
- tasuki 2y ago> If you're at all interested in Java Is that even a thing in 2025? I thought the consensus was that Kotlin has a strictly better syntax than Java. (I'm not even a Kotlin fan. I was pretty sad when Kotlin started taking Scala's market share...)
- Olreich 2y agoKotlin fixes a lot of the verbosity, but its tooling support is shockingly bad compared to Java in VSCode and IntelliJ for me.
- elric 2y agoWhy is it that every time the word Java comes up, some rando without any apparent insight into Java shows up to make weird Kotlin remarks. 1. There is no such thing as "strictly better syntax", that's impossible to objectivize. 2. Kotlin, while growing in popularity, doesn't even hit the 1% mark on the TIOBE index. It is currently less popular than Prolog. Java sits at 10%. 3. Don't yuck someone else's yum. It isn't constructive. It doesn't promote good discussion. And this just reeks of uninformed, subjective "java bad"-bandwagoning.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- danielovichdk 2y agoAre speakers being paid these days ?
- heinrichhartman 2y agoRegular speaker here (who is also on the list). I was never payed for a talk, and I have very rarely heared of people being payed by the conference itself -- appart from some "rock-star" keynotes. Generally talks are sponsored by the person you currently work for - i.e. they pay for travel, and sponsor your time. If you work for a vendor in the space, this runs under marketing expense. If you work for a "regular" company this runs under personal development, employer branding & industry exchange.
- sidchilling 2y agoI don’t like watching videos (or rather can’t watch at night, but can read). To date I haven’t found an AI that can produce a good article from a video. No, not just transcribe the video but actually produce a quality article with images and stuff from the video. Like a human who is instructed as “watch this video and produce a very high quality article that talks about the things talked about in the video”. Has anyone has any luck with this? It would be awesome if I can give this link to AI that will produce a PDF, each video being a chapter in the PDF.
- ignoramous 2y ago> would be awesome if I can give this link to AI that will produce a PDF, each video being a chapter in the PDF If you've got is slides+YouTube, then https://notebooklm.google https://notebooklm.google [0] might work wonderfully well. It does for me. Though, it more Q&A than an article with illustration. [0] https://illuminate.google.com https://illuminate.google.com is its limited/audio-only alternative.
- pistoriusp 2y agoI know these are conferences that they track, but I happen to know the Scott's talk from FOSDEM titled "So You Think You Know Git?" is at 1.3m million views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY
- swyx 2y agofor AI Engineering here is what was popular (30k-300k views): - Jerry Liu on Agentic RAG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeAyuLc_f3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeAyuLc_f3Q - Emil Eifrem on GraphRAG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knDDGYHnnSI&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knDDGYHnnSI&t=2s - Justine Tunney on LlamaFile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mRi-B3t6fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mRi-B3t6fA - Daniel Han on Low Level Technicals of LLMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRM_P6UfdIc&t=5094s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRM_P6UfdIc&t=5094s theres a long tail of others that didnt get the views but i consider quality. we also do AI Engineering Management talks now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiq95JYpBGY&list=PLcfpQ4tk2k0WIh-HLjzW8SPk7cyTSone_&index=13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiq95JYpBGY&list=PLcfpQ4tk2k...
- darksaints 2y agoI watched a little bit of the filesystems in rust talk and while it was a fairly straightforward talk, I was shocked at the q&a session. Emotionally hyperbolic ranting, jumping to conclusions, and wild accusations. I had no idea the linux community was so childish and reactionary towards rust.
- Ygg2 2y agoWhat do you mean? That wasn't a Q&A session, they interrupted the speaker and ate all the time arguing. The speaker didn't get to finish his presentation. This makes me think, whoever wrote these top 100 talks has either questionable tastes or just did a simple query and filter (SELECT * FROM youtube.video WHERE tag = tech SORT BY youtube.video.views LIMIT 100).
- sangeeth96 2y agoI really wish there existed a central platform that tracks/links to all tech conference videos from past to present because YouTube just plain sucks for this and in general, to focus. They've had DECADES to polish this experience (in general for any educational content), at least under the premium tier and I've given up all hopes of them ever getting this right. Off the top of my head, such a platform could: 1. Encourage and foster great discussions (and support markdown!) 2. Have a "community notes" kind of feature to highlight outdated info, errata, related talks etc. 3. Expose brand new conferences and lesser known ones 4. Allow people to share curated lists 5. Likes/dislikes restored 6. View count tracking from across multiple sources (some confs host on their site before YouTube upload) 7. Support for interactive viewing of decks, source code etc. 8. Speaker profiles (w/ verification) 9. Automation to help conferences/speakers/etc. to submit/update content they own/keep things in sync etc. I don't think such a platform exists today but would love to be wrong.
- the_duke 2y agoI've had the same idea a few years ago and started working on it, but never found the time to push it over the finish line.
- apwell23 2y agothis sounds like a lot of work for something this niche
- wslh 2y agoI don't think this is about a niche but rather a broader need for lists, more specifically, integrated lists from users. Pinterest, for example, is built around lists, Amazon has wishlists, IMDb[1] provides movie rankings, etc. From a data portability perspective, the real challenge is getting users to connect all these platforms to a kind of unified list, making it accessible for queries, machine learning, or other applications. This, in my view, is a traction problem rather than a technical one, independent of whether it justifies a business. FriendFeed[2] was a very interesting project where users could connect their profiles with many services and their followers saw their updates. It seems their Tornado web server keeps getting updated [3]. More than a decade ago, I explored some of these ideas [4][5], conceptualizing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) model where data operations could be performed at a global level, dynamically recalculating like a spreadsheet. Going to more complex topics there are resources such as differential dataflows [6]. [1] My movies ranking: https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings/ https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed [3] https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado [4] https://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-language/ https://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration... [5] https://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/ https://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/ [6] https://timelydataflow.github.io/differential-dataflow/introduction.html https://timelydataflow.github.io/differential-dataflow/intro...
- apwell23 2y agoI don't see anything ever dethroning this tech talk from no 1 position https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
- spacechild1 2y agoI didn't expect so many C++ talks in this list. Not bad for a supposedly dying language :) "Introduction to Wait-free Algorithms in C++ Programming" by Daniel Anderson (https://youtube.com/watch?v=kPh8pod0-gk https://youtube.com/watch?v=kPh8pod0-gk) is a very good talk, btw!
- gpderetta 2y agoReports of C++ death are greatly exaggerated.
- spacechild1 2y agoIt's obviously in its last breath, there are only billions of lines left.
- rippeltippel 2y agoThis sounds like survivor bias, fostered by all the "written in Rust" in project titles (HN is a major contributor!). C++ is very well alive, e.g. in graphics, game development, embedded systems, just to name a few. It's a nuanced language for sure, likely not the most user-friendly, but it's not going to die anytime soon.
- spacechild1 2y agoMy comment was very much tongue-in-cheek. Poe's law stroke again.
- culi 2y agoThere was a post on HN that just got removed a minute ago about a Syrian tech conference. Inevitably someone asked if there were any women speakers of note. Out of curiosity I counted up the femme speakers in this list. By the time I finished counting the thread was deleted so I'm gonna post my findings here: 13 out of 100 There were a couple with multiple speakers but they were always all masc except for one that had like 10 speakers
- vismit2000 2y agoThe title should include 'from tech conferences'. Otherwise no Karpathy here is surprising!